How Lagos Became Africa's Payments Capital — and What Comes Next

Amara: Lagos is often described as the fintech capital of Africa. From the inside, what does that mean structurally?

Chidi: It means the infrastructure layer is real and sophisticated. When Paystack launched in 2016, the question was whether Nigerian entrepreneurs could build payment infrastructure. That question is answered. The next question is what you build on top of it, and that's where the interesting work is happening now.

Amara: What is being built on top of it?

Chidi: Three categories. The first is credit — using payment history and alternative data to extend credit to the estimated 80 million Nigerians who are informally employed and invisible to traditional banks. The second is B2B payments — most Nigerian businesses still use bank transfers for everything, which is slow and expensive. There's a large market for payroll, supplier payments, and working capital tools that run on modern rails. The third is cross-border — Nigeria sends roughly $20 billion in remittances annually. The infrastructure for those flows has historically been terrible, expensive, and slow. That's changing fast.

Amara: What's the regulatory environment like under the new CBN framework?

Chidi: More structured than people give it credit for. The Central Bank has been more thoughtful about fintech regulation than many developed-market regulators. The licensing framework is tiered — small operators can get started quickly with limited licenses, scale into fuller licenses as they grow. The challenge is execution speed at the CBN level. The frameworks are good; the processing times are frustrating.